Re: Marvell 88e8057, and SATA disk cache flushing?

[Justin Sherrill <justin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The easy way to find out is to download a recent DragonFly iso or img and boot it; they are live images, and if they work when it boots off a CD/DVD/USB stick, you're set.

I don't know about the cache flushing, but I'll note that Hammer does not have a RAID mechanism.  It works through master/slave mirroring.  I think you can use vinum, but I'd recommend using hardware RAID if possible.

On Sat, Oct 22, 2011 at 11:42 AM, james <james@mansionfamily.plus.com> wrote:

I need to replace my old NAS and I have some hardware to use, but plan A failed dismally because Illumos does not have a working driver for the Marvell 88e8057 GegE chip on my Saphire mobo - an AMD E350 device which I have in a small case (otherwise I'd just add another NIC).

So:

1) does dragonfly support this chip?

Also - while I'm attracted to swap cache (and I have an SSD that I would have used as boot, L2ARC and ZIL) I'm a little concerned that the situation with flushing caches on hard disks isn't as clear as it is with ZFS, which I trust to use write back cackes and flush explicitly.

So:

2) Does Dragonfly have proper support for flushing write back caches on SATA drives?

I have read the notes on 'fsync flush modes' in hammer(8), but this does not discuss whether fsync writes to the drive assuming write-through, or forces a drive cache flush.

I'm also interested in whether such flushes will work if I configure the 4-off 2TB drives as a software RAID5 array.

Thanks
James